Before launching any marketing strategy in your small business, you need to define your goals, audience, and messaging.

Also determine which channels make the most sense for your campaign. i.e. email marketing, social media marketing, your small business website, etc.

You’re also going to need some “lead bait” which is something you give away in exchange for a website visitors contact information.

As a small business, an e-book is a fairly easy form of lead bait to create, just make sure it’s good and provides information of real value.

Minding your customers

As best you can, understand your customers. Influence your customers with educational materials on your website and customer success stories. In blog posts provide answers to your customer’s questions. If you’ve been asked a set of questions over and over and over, each question is a blog post waiting to happen.

When you publish to your website, don’t talk about you. Talk about their problems and their issues. Focus on what they need.

Influence and spread out

This is where social media and email come into play. The most important thing to understand about social media is each social media platform you participate in takes time and effort. Since small businesses lack unlimited time and effort you need to choose which platforms you will participate in and which ones you won’t.

You should base that decision on where your desired audience hangs out. You need to be where they are.